“News from Scotland”: Female Networks in the Travel Narratives of Elizabeth Isabella Spence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article looks at some still relatively neglected travelogues by the Anglo-Scottish novelist and traveller Elizabeth Isabella Spence (1768–1832). Focusing principally on Spence's final book of travels, Letters from the North Highlands of Scotland (1817), the article places this work in the context of the contemporaneous fashion for writing about Scotland and argues that some of the most significant of Spence's influences were other women, including the poet and essayist Anne Grant and Jane Porter, author of the bestselling novel The Scottish Chiefs (1810). While Spence's work shares some of the typical preoccupations of other Scottish travelogues of the day—from antiquarianism to reflections on the sublime—it is markedly different from them in its evocation of and dependence on a social network of female intellectuals. This article argues that Letters from the North Highlands of Scotland creates an unusually feminocentric version of the Romantic-era Scottish tour: it is addressed to Porter; it draws on prior work by (among others) Grant and Elizabeth Hamilton; and it features detailed descriptions of encounters with the Aberdeen working-class poet Christian Milne and the novelist Christian Isobel Johnstone. Unfortunately for Spence, that aspect of her work also fuelled a devastatingly satiric Blackwood's review that turned her into a laughing stock.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".